Constance Fenimore Woolson

by Anne Boyd Rioux

  At the end of “Château,” Katharine is terribly silent. We do not hear her voice at all. She has promised never to write again, to be instead a dependent, obedient “true woman” in exchange for Ford’s hand. The story makes clear how far from beguiling the prospect of marriage was to an independent woman with talent and ambition. Life without art and self-reliance would be, as it seemingly is for Katharine, a kind of death. Marriage is even less of a happy ending here than it was in “Street.” Ford may go down on his knees and get misty-eyed, but he rules her and silences her in the end.

  When “Château” was done, Woolson sent it to Harper’s, but they declined to publish it, most likely because Anne was just then running in the magazine. So she would lay it away in a trunk for six years before she sent it back to Harper’s, who then gratefully accepted it. By then, the sting of Ford’s and James’s derision had lessened.

  TRIUMPHS AND TRIALS OF ANNE

  Just as Woolson was writing her troubling stories about women artists and writers, she was, ironically, also enjoying the greatest success of her career. After a summer of excellent reviews for Rodman the Keeper, Anne had begun its run in Harper’s in December 1880. The editors had held it for so long because they wanted it to premiere simultaneously in America and in the first issue of the new English edition of the magazine. (James’s Washington Square was completing its run.)

  From its first appearance, Anne was a hit. The Critic announced that it was “attracting flattering attention both in this country and in England,” adding that “[t]he development of a genuinely American novelist is a matter of no little interest.”24 The public’s fascination would only grow over the eighteen months it took for the novel to run its course.

  Woolson didn’t know how well Anne was doing. No one sent her reviews, she complained. But the English and American readers she encountered on her travels gave her very positive reports. By the spring of 1882, fan letters were arriving in every post. They found her in Sorrento, where she spent another reclusive winter in a room overlooking the Bay of Naples with the smoke of Mt. Vesuvius in the distance.

  During her stay in Sorrento, a letter arrived from Harper & Brothers that most writers can only dream of. Inside was a thousand-dollar check, doubling her pay for the serialization of Anne, along with a contract to publish it as a book. In a handwritten clause, the firm claimed the right of first refusal on all of her future writing.25 Harper & Brothers had from the outset of her career desired an exclusive relationship with her, but now they were ready to make a serious commitment. And she was ready to accept their offer. From here on she would publish all of her stories, essays, and books with them. They would, in turn, promote her works and reputation as one of their own.

  When she sat down to write to James shortly after receiving the good news, she couldn’t help but share it. Just as quickly she regretted it. His response has not survived, but it stung her so deeply that months later she was still upset with herself for having mentioned the bonus and the offer. Her apology conveys how much his judgment of women writers had gotten under her skin:

  All the money that I have received, or shall receive, from my long novel, does not equal probably the half of the sum you received for your first, or shortest. It is quite right that it should be so. And, even if a story of mine should have a large “popular” sale (which I do not expect), that could not alter the fact that the utmost best of my work cannot touch the hem of your first or poorest. My work is coarse beside yours. Of entirely another grade. The two should not be mentioned on the same day. Do pray believe how acutely I know this. If I feel anything in the world with earnestness it is the beauty of your writings, & any little thing I may say about my own comes from entirely another stratum; & is said because I live so alone, as regards to my writing, that sometimes when writing to you, or speaking to you—out it comes before I know it.26

  Underneath the pleading tone is an unmistakable note of fear—fear that she had jeopardized their friendship, and that in exposing her ambitions she had become the object of his ridicule. The episode actually tells us as much about James as it does about Woolson. Unwittingly, she had touched a nerve. Although she thought him supremely confident, impervious to criticism or fear, he was actually deeply afraid of critical and commercial failure, as his biographers have documented. The two writers would in time share their fears with each other, but at this early date she read his response as a sign of his disdain rather than his jealousy.

  In fact, Woolson was winning the implicit contest between them for readers, which her thousand-dollar bonus signified. Indeed, while The Portrait of a Lady was read by 12,000 readers in the Atlantic Monthly, Anne had run almost simultaneously in the more popular Harper’s to a circulation of 100,000. And while Portrait would go on to sell 6,000 copies in book form, more than any of James’s previous novels (or any afterward, as it would turn out), Anne would sell nearly ten times that—57,000 copies.27

  Woolson’s letters to James about Portrait, while they reflect her sincere respect for his achievement, were also meant to distract him from her novel’s greater success. She paid keen attention to Portrait’s reviews, noting the new tone the critics took toward him. No longer the young writer showing so much promise, nor the presumptuous author of Hawthorne who had to be put in his place, he had arrived. She dismissed the negative tone of many reviewers, questioning their powers of perception. (The Literary World called it a “cruel book in its dissection of character,” and The Critic complained, “There is not a single character in the book to whom we grow enthusiastically attached.”) Woolson revealed herself to be an astute reader, able to appreciate what the narrow-minded critics could not. Her own view was that Portrait was “the finest novel you have written.” His portrayal of Isabel, with whom she felt “so much in sympathy,” had particularly impressed her, as did the final scene, in which Isabel is subjected to a passionate kiss from her longtime suitor. It had a “force (which real life does contain, I think)—a force which you have rather held back,” she told him.28

  Yet Woolson didn’t simply flatter James. She corrected what she saw as some minor missteps but particularly complained that he did not allow the reader to “see, with any distinctness, whether Isabel really loved Osmond.” It is simply “left to the imagination of the reader,” she wrote, “as things easily to be supplied,—according to the time-honored method of Mr Henry James.”29 Writing to him as a reader, she nonetheless nudged him in the direction of her own writing. But by hiding her ambitions from him, she was also allowing him to look past her, to see in her primarily a reflection of his own great desire for fame and recognition, and to assume her ambitions were all for him. In the coming years, as he confronted fears of failure and irrelevance, he would come to rely quite heavily on that reflection, on her interest and admiration.

  If the critics had taken a new tone with James, they did so with Woolson as well when Anne was published in book form seven months after Portrait, in July 1882. Sam sent her The Century’s review, which was representative in its judgment that “the opening chapters are the freshest and most charming” as compared to the off-key murder trial in the last third; however, looked at as a whole, the novel marked a new level of achievement for American novelists. The review’s concluding lines heralded Woolson’s arrival in the ranks she had longed to join: “Sometimes one is ready to say that a fragment, and not an inferior fragment, of the mantle of George Eliot is resting on her capable shoulders.”30 (Eliot had died just as Anne was beginning its serialization.)

  The overall tone of most of the reviews was that a major American writer had arrived on the transatlantic literary scene. The Atlantic, no longer under Howells’s editorship, began its review with the belief that Anne could be one of the works that fifty years hence would have “an enduring fame . . . in the succession of literature.” The Californian summed up, “We observe from the reviews that Miss Woolson’s novel has brought to the front again the undying hope and expectation of the Great American Novel.” Others
called Anne a work of “genius” and the product of a “master hand.” One paper called it “one of the strongest and most perfectly finished American novels ever written.”31

  Some critics positioned Woolson as America’s foremost female author. According to the New York Tribune, Anne “proves the author’s right to stand without question at the head of American women novelists.” Others let her lay claim to the wider world of writers, ranking her next to or just below Howells and James. One magazine believed her promise was so great she would not “always rank after these two.” The Century wrote the following year that Woolson had a great “chance of becoming our best novelist” because she had “something of the analytic touch” as well as the “power of passion.”32

  In England, where disapproval of the analytical novel was intense, Anne’s compromise between plot-driven and character-driven works did not go unnoticed. The London Academy declared, “We venture to say that Anne is one of the most remarkable works of fiction that have appeared for many years. It is remarkable for its own sake—for animation of plot and character; and it is remarkable as holding a place midway between the old American novel of incident and the modern American novel of analysis.”33

  Sadly, Woolson remained largely unaware of critics’ assessments. Although the Harpers apprised her of their general tone and signed her to an exclusive contract as a result, The Century review that Sam sent to her was apparently the only one she saw. Knowing in more detail the overall estimation of her accomplishment could have helped to ameliorate the inferiority complex her friendship with James had inspired. James, it seems, expressed little or no interest in Anne at the time. The following year, Constance wrote to him of a friend of his who had read her novel and wanted to meet her, adding, “ ‘Anne’ is a book I once wrote.”34

  James may not have noticed her triumph, but his magazine did. Even before the reviews of Anne had begun to appear, the Atlantic Monthly’s new editor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, requested a serial from Woolson.35 She was flattered, but her new agreement with Harper & Brothers prohibited it. It was a sure sign that she had arrived.

  It is probably no coincidence that Aldrich was a friend of Constance’s old supporter Stedman, who still expressed interest in her career. If her new friend had failed her, her old one did not. He wrote to her later that year,

  Of course I read “Anne” seriatim—you never write a line that I do not read at once. You could not have felt more concerned than myself in its quality, in its reception. All in all, I considered it a beautiful work—an epochal stage in your career as a creative writer. . . . [A]s a first novel, ‘Anne’ is a noble effort, confirming me in my early belief that you can and will produce masterpieces, and become our foremost writer of imaginative prose.36

  In addition to bolstering her ambitions, Stedman also approved of her literary methods, advising her to remain committed to the course she was on:

  You are now sure of your audience; take your time, do not overwork, do not strain your eyes, do not be afraid to lie “fallow” for long periods—meditating great rather than many novels. You have only yourself to maintain, and have not ____’s [probably Howells’s] excuse for bringing out a new book every half-year. Your imagination is more creative than Howells’s or James’s—follow your own vent, give us life and passion and color, and do not, like them, overdo your “analysis” and “subtilties” [sic]. Their novels are clever, dexterous; let yours be free, imaginative, dramatic, human, and not without poetic elevation.37

  This letter is one of the very few Woolson received that survived her many years of traveling. It must have been tremendously important to her, a talisman she could turn to at times of doubt, when she began to question her own literary instincts.

  It was only a few months later, in fact, that Woolson exhibited more confidence when she wrote to James with advice for his future work. She boldly suggested that he “give us a woman for whom we can feel a real love . . . let her love, and let us see that she does; do not leave it merely implied. In brief, let us care for her, & even greatly. . . . Believe me, it is the touchstone to sympathy. . . . This is all commonplace enough no doubt; this desire in the reader to be stirred; to be worked upon; to care. But I only ask you to do it once.”38 The challenge she had implicitly made in “ ‘Miss Grief’ ” was now explicit. Behind it lay the continued hope that he would care for her writing. But she would have to keep assuring him that his work inhabited a realm far above hers.

  THE MASKS WOMEN WORE

  Constance’s independent life as an artist abroad very nearly came to an abrupt end as the summer of 1882 approached. Alone in Sorrento, she fell ill with fever and an irritating cough, losing much of the sixteen pounds she had so proudly gained over the previous year. “To be ill alone in a foreign land is a dreary experience,” she wrote to James. “And it seemed to me as I lay feverish & coughing, that I must go home; go home, get my precious books, & little household gods together, a dog or two, & never stir again.”39 This was her first experience of illness in exile, and it scared her.

  Solitude was necessary for her work. It suited her so long as she could take meals in her room and have scenic vistas to contemplate and lovely landscapes to explore. But illness had turned her idyll into a nightmare. With no “home” to return to and the Benedicts on their way back to Europe, Constance repaired to Florence, where she found a British doctor to help her recover. After her convalescence, she joined Clara and Plum for the summer in the German spa town Baden-Baden. Constance admired the nearby forests but instead of exploring them went into her vortex again, writing her next long work.

  The Harpers were eager for a new serial to begin in November, so Constance dusted off For the Major, which she had begun in Menton over two years before. It took six weeks of ten-hour days and a further two weeks of thirteen-hour days to finish it. As her arm ached up to the shoulder, she remembered bitterly James’s comment in Florence that he never copied, and she was overcome with “despair,” she told him, “that, added to your other perfections, was the gift of writing as you do, at the first draft!” Of course this wasn’t the whole truth—the manuscript of The Portrait of a Lady was written at least twice, but his comment increased her perception of a great chasm between them.40

  A rift was growing between Constance and her sister as well. As Clara later remembered it, every evening she had to coax her sister out of her room so she could stretch her legs, hear the band music in the park, and observe the promenade of the fashionable tourists. Constance was quite aware of Clara’s displeasure at “my being shut up in my own rooms, invisible until evening. . . . She greatly detests all my mss. & has already presented me with a new dress and round-hat, so that I shall not look too ‘literary.’ ”41 Constance resented more than ever having to play the part of someone she was not—a fashionable, conventional woman. As it happened, the masks women had to wear were at the heart of the book she was writing as well.

  For the Major was not a long work. It came to less than half the length of Anne, but it took just as long to write. The pace of Woolson’s writing was slowing down as she worked harder to achieve formal perfection. It is perhaps not surprising that she drew her ambitions in a bit with For the Major. It was not a novel, she insisted, but simply a modest portrait of village life, probably too quiet to become a popular success. She hardly expected the critics to pay any attention to it. Yet she felt she had achieved in it a higher level of artistry than in Anne.42

  For the Major has been considered by some to be Woolson’s best book and has evoked comparisons to Jane Austen. It does in fact more closely resemble Austen’s finely detailed work than the broader, more ambitious novels of Eliot and the Brontës that had inspired Anne. With a few exceptions (the Atlantic and the Nation), the critics agreed that the work was superior to her first novel. For the Major was viewed as more artistically complete. “Nothing could be more conscious, finished, modern, than this work,” asserted the Overland Monthly. The “fine precision” of the language was reminiscent o
f Henry James. Many continued to compare her to George Eliot. The Boston Globe asserted that For the Major was a “work of genius” and that “of all American writers of fiction, Miss Woolson may easily become the novelist laureate,” a line the Harpers would quote in advertisements for the rest of her career. The New York Times called her “the most promising of our women novelists.” As Woolson had predicted, however, For the Major was not a popular book. It sold only a tenth as well as Anne—under 6,000 copies.43

  For the Major is in some ways a perfect local-color novel in its depiction of the peculiarities of a small, isolated mountain community near Asheville. The novella is a sensitive, economic rendering of village life and one woman’s poignant struggle to keep her age and experience hidden from her husband. Madam Carroll has dyed her hair, worn makeup, and pretended to be a young woman not for her own sake but for that of her husband, Major Carroll, who is growing senile. As Madam Carroll explains, she allowed the Major to think her young and ignorant of the world to win his love. As time passed she wondered, “[W]ould he continue to love me if he should know that instead of being the youthful little woman barely twenty-three, I was over thirty-five? that instead of being inexperienced, unacquainted with the dark side of life, I knew all, had been through all?” At the time of their meeting, she had been a destitute woman whose husband had killed a man and fled with their son. When the major appeared and loved her for her “little doll-like face and curls,” she gratefully accepted his offer of marriage, believing her husband and son to have died during the attempt to capture them. Thereafter she maintained the façade out of love for the major, she claims, although certainly also out of fear of losing him.44